The argument has two layers. On one level it’s about the tension between distant reading and New Historicism. The New Historical anecdote fuses history with literary representation in a vivid, influential way, by compressing a large theme into a brief episode. Can quantitative arguments about the past aspire to the same kind of compression and vividness?

Inside that metacritical frame, there’s a history of narrative pace, based on evidence I gathered in collaboration with Sabrina Lee and Jessica Mercado. (We’re also working on a separate co-authored piece that will dive more deeply into this data.)

We ask how much fictional time is narrated, on average, in 250 words. We discover some dramatic changes across a timeline of 300 years, and I’m tempted to include our results as an illustration here. But I’ve decided not to, because I want to explore whether scholars already, intuitively know how the representation of duration has changed, by asking readers to reflect for a moment on what they expect to see.

So instead of illustrating this post with real evidence, I’ve provided a plausible, counterfactual illustration based on an account of duration that one might extract from influential narratological works by Gérard Genette or Seymour Chatman.